Author: Ryan Abel

Effective client communication is the cornerstone of our success as a company. When handled correctly, communication builds client trust. More trust means more decision making power and a better overall relationship. When handled poorly, FUDA can happen, and the relationship can suffer.Read more on Three Ways to Improve Your Client Communication…

At Atomic, we work in small, self-managing teams. This means that everyone on the team has the chance to communicate with the client.

Unfortunately, it can be easy for senior developers to become the entire voice of their team and make their teammates feel like their opinions and contributions aren’t appreciated. This may lead to FUDA, poor performance, and low morale within the team. Here are three things I’ve learned that help empower and build trust with your team. Read more on Three Ways To Empower Your Team as a Senior Developer…

When I ramp onto a new project, one of the first things I do is to look at the system test suite. Because system tests exercise the entire system, they are a great place to document the intent and assumptions built into your application. When they are written well, they can be a source of documentation and a tool to educate others on the behaviors of an application. Read more on Making Your System Tests More Readable…

Frameworks are constantly changing and evolving—especially open-source ones, which we rely heavily on at Atomic. And it’s not always easy to stay up to date.

Updates sometimes deprecate APIs or introduce new architecture patterns. These changes can require significant rework of a project, and they are expensive for customers. Nevertheless, updates are worth it. In the long run, the expense of keeping your project’s technologies up-to-date greatly outweighs the cost. Read more on Three Reasons To Keep Your Frameworks Up To Date…

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a protocol for single sign-on. SAML handles communication between a service provider (SP) and an identity provider (IdP). The identity provider acts as an authentication and identification mechanism for service providers.

Git is a very important tool. Not only does it keep a history of a project, but Git also makes it easy for a team to collaborate in a codebase. Although it’s such an important tool, it’s often under-utilized and on occasion, even neglected.

A clean Git history is easy to understand and tells a story about the project. It’s evident when features were added and how they were implemented. I’ve come to cherish a clean Git history on a project. The good news is, it’s not very difficult to keep this history clean. Read more on Four Steps To Maintaining a Clean Git History…

We all have them. Those once-great ideas that are now gathering dust somewhere in a GitHub repository. They start out fun and exciting, but quickly move to the back burner and out of your mind altogether.

Homebrew is an extraordinarily helpful tool to install and maintain system libraries. However, until I found out about the switch command, I didn’t have a straightforward way to switch between versions of a particular keg. Here’s how you can use it to switch between Postgres versions.